


found

by hellynz



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: And Friendship, Angst, F/F, and more - Freeform, short lil thing about loneliness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2019-12-21
Packaged: 2021-02-27 02:22:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21889903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellynz/pseuds/hellynz
Summary: There was something tucked halfway behind a column. Wrinkled and purple, and as Yaz leaned over to get a closer look, she realized it was an old jumper. It was not faded or covered in dust - Yaz had never actually seen dust on the TARDIS before - but somehow she could tell it was old. It radiated memories.-Yaz comes across something that belonged to Rose.
Relationships: The Doctor (Doctor Who)/Rose Tyler, Thirteenth Doctor/Yasmin Khan
Comments: 14
Kudos: 118





	found

**Author's Note:**

  * For [13stardisfam](https://archiveofourown.org/users/13stardisfam/gifts).



> emily: is born  
> me: put glasses on the doctor RIGHT NOW
> 
> THIS IS FOR EMILY BC SHE DESERVES THE WORLD sorry that it's so late on in the day I literally woke up and threw away the almost completed actual present-fic I had going and then wrote this instead. You deserve the WORLD.
> 
> everyone go follow her its her birthday https://thirteenstardisfam.tumblr.com/
> 
> and thank you to wreckageofstars for reading this over for me

Wandering the TARDIS had become a regular habit of Yaz’s. Despite Graham’s muttered protests that she’d get lost and they’d never find her again, she’d never felt unsafe or unsure loping down the halls, no idea where she was going or where she would end up. It led her to windows with views she never would have seen otherwise, to rooms full of scientific equipment so advanced it almost looked like magic, and to the fact that for some reason the TARDIS had a pool.

And when she was done wandering and started thinking about how she needed to find her way back to the kitchen, or her bedroom, or the console, it seemed like whatever she wanted was always right around the next corner.

When the TARDIS showed up a few days earlier than planned and sat on the corner near Yaz’s house, she entered without any trouble, the door clicking open underneath her gentle press. The Doctor was not in the console room, or the kitchen. So Yaz decided to wander a bit.

If the TARDIS was a sentient being like the Doctor claimed, then the ship could have favorites. And Yaz thought that maybe she just liked Yaz better than Graham, who claimed that once he’d opened his closet door just to swing it out into the emptiness of space.

“Room with a view!” the Doctor had said, grinning. “It’s an upgrade.” 

Yaz had smothered a grin behind her hand at the way the Doctor’s eyes had flashed, wicked and teasing above her sincere grin. And the Doctor had glanced over and winked at her.

For all the ways the Doctor was daft, she wasn’t quite as clueless as she pretended to be. That was maybe was made it so frustrating that she didn’t seem to have the slightest idea that Yaz had an enormous crush on her.

Yaz cringed, even though she was alone with her own thoughts, and took the next right she saw, then left, then right again, following a pattern to try to get deeper into the ship than ever before. She had been trying to smother her feelings for months, ever since her mother had asked them if they were seeing each other and the Doctor hadn’t known. She cringed again, speeding up her pace as if she could run from the memories, the way she’d stuttered out her answer.

It wasn’t that being friends wasn’t excellent, because it was. But Yaz couldn’t help the way she idolized the Doctor, the way she always wanted to be around her, the way she thought about her constantly. 

It was embarrassing, to be so thoroughly in love with an alien who would never even consider becoming involved with a human.

The next corner she rounded took her into a space that was distinctly different from any she'd seen before.

There were dim lights and pillars of crystals, still. But the walls were cold metal, sharp. Very unlike the warm circles in the console room and in most of the main hallways. The air felt prickly, energetic and barely contained and sharp. As she slowed to take in the new space, something else caught her eye.

There was something tucked halfway behind a column. Wrinkled and purple, and as Yaz leaned over to get a closer look, she realized it was an old jumper. It was not faded or covered in dust - Yaz had never actually seen dust on the TARDIS before - but somehow she could tell it was old. It radiated memories. 

As she picked it up, the hum of the ship around her slowed.

Yaz glanced around. The hall seemed a bit darker, subdued. It wasn’t scary, still, even though she had no idea where it was. But something was permeating the air. A sadness. It weighed heavy on her as she returned her gaze to the jumper.

It definitely wasn’t anything that belonged to Ryan or Graham. And it wasn’t the Doctor’s style either, and didn’t seem like something to be worn by a Scotsman. So who-

The sadness in the air. The talk of the Doctor’s family, gone now. Oh. 

It hadn’t really occurred to Yaz that the Doctor almost certainly had brought other humans onboard. As she settled back onto her heels, the jumper tangled in her hands, it seemed obvious. Of course she had. They were her friends, but they weren’t so special that they were the first ones ever to go along with her. The Doctor could have brought dozens, or hundreds of humans along with her.

It settled bitter in Yaz’s heart. She felt cheated, despite herself, despite the fact that she knew she was being a bit ridiculous. Because she was Graham, in this scenario. Being teased and brought along by a Doctor who pretended to be clueless. 

The Doctor knew so much about them. She had gone to Grace’s funeral, she had watched Yaz’s Nani marry her first love and seen her lose him that same day. She knew about Ryan’s dad, the ways that he had failed, and she had judged him for it.

But for all the knowledge she had about them, what did they have about her?

It was not right, that Yaz had to realize other humans had walked these halls before her by coming across some long-forgotten clothes. It made her feel violated and as if she was violating something without realizing. She didn’t like it. How had she let the Doctor get away with it for so long?

Suddenly, there was a light just down the hall.

Yaz refocused, and wasn’t quite sure if it had been there the whole time but she had just not noticed. Or if it had just flickered into existence, maybe through the manipulation of a sentient time machine.

As she rose, she saw the light was coming from a half open door. From where she was, she could see a bookshelf as tall as the wall it leaned against, and the gentle glow of a lamp. Then she rounded the corner, and froze.

The Doctor was wearing reading glasses.

Yaz stood in the doorway of what was apparently some kind of library or reading room on the TARDIS. The Doctor sat in an arm chair in the corner, knees tucked up against herself and chin resting on them, reading a blue book with text on the front that Yaz didn’t recognize, and she was wearing glasses. She looked entirely too small and adorable, curled up, her coat and braces and shoes gone, hair mussed, and glasses on.

As she watched, the Doctor shifted a bit, squinting, and pushed her glasses further up on her nose. Yaz thought she might combust.

She was still gaping when the Doctor looked up and noticed her.

“Hey, Yaz, didn’t see you there,” she said, straightening up, crossing her legs so she was still perched entirely in the chair. She looked tiny and young and the way she smiled at Yaz made her heart melt in her chest.

She couldn’t help but grin back. “Hi," she said dimly, and then she backpedaled. "Oh- yeah, sorry. What are you up to?”

The Doctor shrugged. “Reading. Thinking. What have you got there?” she asked, her eyes wandering down to Yaz’s hand clenched into purple fabric.

“Oh!” She let it unfold and shook it out, raising it up in front of herself. “I found this.”

She felt very foolish, suddenly. What was she going to say? But then she glanced up.

The Doctor’s mouth had fallen open a bit, and she was staring at the jumper. “Where in the stars did you find that?” she asked, her voice low, something almost like reverence twisting behind it. She leaned forward in her chair and took it as Yaz held it out, her fingers trembling just a little as she spread it out across her lap, smoothing it, staring at it. 

Yaz felt as if she was disrupting something very intimate.

“I found it in the halls,” she said softly. “I wander around sometimes, see what pops up. It was just... on the floor, uhm-” she cut herself off to clear her throat. The Doctor’s eyes were hidden, much of her face thrown into shadow from the light behind her, and Yaz could not quite tell how she was reacting. She was just staring at the jumper, spreading her hands across it over and over again.

“I wanted to ask you who it belonged to,” she finished. 

The Doctor was quiet for a long moment. And then she hummed and settled back, plucking the fabric off of her lap and folding it. “Old friend of mine!” she said, and her voice was too happy, her eyes too wide as she raised her face to grin at Yaz. “Guess the old girl didn’t do as good of a job cleaning up these past couple go-arounds as I’d thought, if you can still find Rose’s- if you can still find this stuff lying about.”

She was faking cheer, Yaz could see it in her eyes, even obscured just a bit by her glasses. “Who was Rose?”

The Doctor flinched back. Her mouth stayed open in a grin but somehow it shifted, more of a grimace. That same sadness pricked the air again.

"Nobody," she said quickly, then winced. "Well, not nobody, far from nobody, someone I- someone I knew, once." She smiled again, but every time she dragged the fake happy back out it had deteriorated more. Like a crumpled up piece of paper, she could lie it flat again but it would never be quite the same.

But Yaz wanted to know. She needed to hear their stories, not just to loosen the tightness of jealousy and uncomfort in her chest. But because, from the way the Doctor was staring at her, she might need to tell them, too.

The Doctor looked small and sad in her oversized chair. And she looked lonely. Her eyes were sad like they had been before Yaz invited her for tea that first time. A dog watching his owner walk away, convinced it will be the last time they ever see each other.

Yaz stepped further into the room, taking the little bit of boldness she could find and using it. “What are you doing in here, anyways? Wasn’t expecting you back for a few days.”

“Oh, just hanging out. You know,” the Doctor shrugged again, that pained smile still plastered on her face, one knee bouncing up and down. “Didn’t find much to do out in space so I decided to come back here.”

Yaz frowned and moved to sit on a stool just next to the Doctor. “Were you going to wait here till the weekend? All by yourself?”

The Doctor wrinkled her nose and nodded, not quite looking up at Yaz. “Had some reading to do!” She shook the book in the air in front of her as if Yaz had somehow missed it.

“You could’ve at least come round for tea. Didn’t you think you’d get lonely?”

That struck a chord. The Doctor stilled and lowered her book, letting it rest on top of the jumper spread over the arm of her chair. “Well, that’s why I came back to Sheffield. Didn’t get the timing quite right, but...” she trailed off and shrugged. “Being landed here is at least less lonely than floating around in the vortex.”

“Oh,” Yaz said, so profoundly sad at the idea that she couldn’t quite come up with any other response. All of her irritation and weird sense of doubt from before buried under this new, crushing pressure in her chest.

The Doctor had probably traveled with hundreds. Which meant she’d lost hundreds, too.

“I think the TARDIS wanted me to find that,” she found herself saying, pointing at the purple fabric the Doctor had shifted one hand over to fiddle with. “Maybe talking about her could do you some good.”

The Doctor clicked her tongue and frowned, shaking her head just a little. She had to push her glasses back up to keep them from falling off. “Oh, probably not, probably just a coincidence. Though, technically the halls don’t even exist until you walk into them. Well-”

Yaz cut her off before she could really get ramped up into a lecture. “I’d like to hear about her, though. You never tell me- us anything about your old friends. Your family.”

She shrugged and laid her cards on the table. “You talk about your past so little, I sort of didn’t process the fact that we weren’t the first humans to live on the TARDIS till I found that. Made me feel a bit weird.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Yaz,” the Doctor said, and her voice was so solemn that Yaz looked at her instinctively. None of the fake smile was left there anymore. “I didn’t mean for that at all. I have been a bit secretive in this body, but not to shut you out.”

She sighed. “I just-” She rocked back and forth in her chair a bit, both hands up in front of her and gesturing, but no words coming out. Eventually she huffed out a breath, put her hands back in her lap and glanced over at Yaz, pleading. 

Yaz did not give in. “Go on.”

The Doctor stared at her for a moment, and then, surprising Yaz, laughed, her smile not quite reaching her eyes. “You remind me a lot of her sometimes, you know that? Of- of Rose.”

Yaz smiled back, but then the Doctor frowned again. “Although, I guess you don’t really know how much of a compliment that is until I tell you about her. You’ve really got me in a corner here,” she said, addressing the ceiling this time, glaring up at it. 

Yaz snorted. The jumper had definitely been left behind for a reason. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. I’d really like to hear. But you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”

The Doctor wouldn’t be able to resist her, and Yaz knew it. She’d seen the Doctor brush off Ryan or Graham for things she’d never deny Yaz, had so easily talked her into visiting her own past when apparently that was a huge no for most of the time. 

And she was right. The Doctor sighed, leaned back, and began to speak.

“Rose is- she was proof of something, to me. And I lost her in a pretty terrible way. It still stings to think about her. She was your age, you know, when she joined me.”

Yaz ached to know what happened to her. But she did not press her luck. She let the Doctor continue.

“She came to me just after I had- some stuff happen. Some... altering stuff. The kind of stuff that makes you wonder about other stuff, makes you question everything about who you are, you know?” Her eyebrows knit together as she glanced up at Yaz.

Somehow, despite the vagueness of the words, Yaz did know. She nodded.

The Doctor sighed. “And she came to me as proof. She was so good, and funny, and open, and she took everything so seriously but she was so lighthearted, too. She proved that I was right. About humans, and hope, and- and love, love too,” she said, suddenly speeding up her words. “She taught me I still knew how to love. Not just platonically either, not like how I love my friends, you know, the boys...”

Heat rushed to Yaz’s face again, and it seemed to have gone to the Doctor’s too, her cheeks just a little too pink. “You know, ever since her, I keep saying I’m not going to get into that with another human, and then-”

She trailed off again, and then she let out a long sigh and shook her head, one side of her mouth curling up. “And then someone like you shows up and blows me away again.”

Yaz thought she might die on the spot, quite literally. Excitement twirled with the sadness in her chest and the conflicting feelings felt as if they might tear her apart. It was quiet in the room, with the Doctor paused in her story, and Yaz thought that maybe she should say something, but didn’t trust herself to speak. It was a good thing, in the end. Because the Doctor, after a few more long seconds of contemplation, kept going.

“Do you know, I never said it to her?” she said. “She knew how I felt, but I never told her. I tried once, ran out of time. Had the chance one more time and I just didn’t. Told myself I was making it easier for her, but it was for me. You think I’m selfish now, you should’ve seen me three faces ago,” she finished, smirking, glancing over at Yaz.

“You’re not selfish,” Yaz said, immediate, because how could the Doctor be selfish? She’d seen what she’d done for others, seen how hard she worked. 

But the Doctor nodded. “I am, truly. I’m being selfish right now, telling you this, knowing that you- knowing that you have a thing for me, too, and knowing that I’m going to tell you at the end of this sentence that I can’t act on it. At least, not how humans act on it.”

Of course she couldn’t. She was an alien, thousands of years old, and Yaz was nineteen. She was an older sister, she’d been bullied and fought past it, she was a police officer. But she was also a nineteen year old human girl. Barely past childhood.

She was like Rose.

“You don’t have to,” Yaz said, and kept going as the Doctor raised her eyes to her. “You really don’t. I- yes, okay, I have feelings for you, shut up,” she said, unable to keep from smiling as the Doctor chuckled. “But I also- I don’t know you very well, do I? I don’t know the names of any of the family you say you’ve lost except Rose. I don’t know how the TARDIS works or why you do what you do.”

She hesitated just a moment. The Doctor was still looking at her, and was it that her eyes were sparkling or was it just the reflections off of the glasses again?

“We don’t have to do anything at all. We can keep going as we are, and then maybe more, down the line.”

Yaz moved so her hand was lying, palm up, on the arm of the chair. “I don’t need much. Just- promise me that if it comes to it, you’ll say it out loud to me, okay?”

The Doctor’s hand shot out so fast Yaz jumped a bit, but it stopped right above Yaz’s palm. Then, slowly, she settled it down, letting their fingers tangle gently together. Then she took her other hand and placed it there, too, so that she was holding Yaz with a cold, shaking grip.

“That much I can do,” the Doctor said, her voice low and hoarse.

They sat for just a moment, hands together. Hearts in the open. Or as in the open as they could be, at the time. It was enough.

“Do you really feel that much better just by being in Sheffield?” Yaz asked quietly.

The Doctor snorted. “Makes me sound a bit pathetic. Honestly, no, that’s not it. It’s more just... the option. The possibility.”

Yaz tilted her head, but didn’t have to ask the question. The Doctor looked up at her and smiled, much more genuine than before, small and soft and reaching her eyes. “That somebody might come and seek me out.” She sighed and leaned back, pulling Rose’s jumper close to her chest with one hand, squeezing Yaz’s hand with the other. “That way I don’t have to give in and bother you all if you don’t have the time for it. But even if I’m hiding, sometimes having someone find me is nice.”

She frowned and wiggled her shoulders around, sitting up suddenly and shaking her head. “Got me talking all sentimental.” She stood fast, letting both the jumper and Yaz’s hand fall from her grasp. “No time to dwell, we’ve got things to do now that you’re here!” Tucking the book under one arm, she made for the door. Yaz leapt to her feet and glanced down at the purple jumper, lying tossed against the armchair.

“Doctor, wait- don’t you want to bring this? Or do something with it?” she asked, gesturing.

The Doctor paused in the doorway, holding herself against it with one hand. The glare of the light on her glasses completely blocked out her eyes as she gazed down at it. But then she reached up and took them off, and she was smiling again.

“Nah,” she said, stepping out into the hall and leaving no option for Yaz but to follow. “Kind of like that it’s floating around these old halls. Look at it, popping up for us just when we need it today and I didn’t even know it existed. Means I might come across it again one day. I’m all about possibilities, Yaz, concrete stuff is boring.”

She strode down the hallway at a breakneck speed, like she knew exactly where she was going. Yaz very much doubted she did, but she knew she’d end up where she needed to be.

She shut the door to their small library nook softly after one last thankful glance at the chair.

**Author's Note:**

> CAN'T SPELL EMILY WITHOUT ILY
> 
> lmao on a more personal note I have halfheartedly vanished from the internet because of Mental Health Reasons but hopefully the new episodes soon inspire me a bit bc I have some cool stuff planned. 
> 
> kudos & comments are so appreciated every single time!!!!


End file.
